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A new article by Jason Nance and Dylan Steinberg provides some more information on The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results from a National Study. You can download the full text gratis from SSRN at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=988847. And here's their abstract:

"The student-edited law review has been a muchcriticized institution. Many commentators have expressed theirbelief that students are unqualified to determine which articlesshould be published in which journals, but these discussions havebeen largely based on anecdotal evidence of how journals makepublication decisions. It was against that backdrop that weundertook a national survey of law reviews in an attempt todetermine how student editors responsible for making publicationdecisions went about their task. This article compiles theresults of that survey, which received 191 responses from 163different journals. We analyzed 56 factors that influence theselection process and then grouped similar items together to form17 constructs using factor analysis. Finally, we disaggregatedthe results to determine whether the results were significantlydifferent based on the prestige of the journals involved. Whilemany of our results confirm what has been widely assumed to betrue, there are also some surprising findings. We found, forexample, that Articles Editors seek to publish articles fromwell-known and widely-respected authors. It appears, however,that editors do not assume that prestigious authors produce thebest scholarship, but instead they pursue the work of well-knownauthors because it can increase their journals' prestige withinthe legal academic community. The survey reveals that editors arenot nearly as likely to seek out articles dealing with hot ortrendy topics as some commentators have assumed, and that authordiversity plays almost no role in the article selection process.We hope that our study will provide some structure to the ongoingdebate about how best to use students in the law reviewpublication process and will allow a more informed considerationof whether students are sufficiently well-trained to evaluatearticles and whether they are using the proper criteria."